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Song of Myself

Nyack, N.Y. - IF there is a bandwagon in the works to eliminate the president's State of the Union address, I'm jumping aboard. There has always been something uncomfortably imperious about the speech. Originally known as the Annual Message, it mimics the "speech from the throne" that opens Parliament. Thomas Jefferson abandoned the spectacle when he became president, preferring to send his constitutionally mandated message to Congress in writing. His republican example succeeded in killing the ritual for more than a hundred years.

It was Woodrow Wilson, Anglophile and world-class meddler, who revived the custom of delivering the address in person, prompting one senator to lament "this cheap and tawdry imitation of English royalty."

Cheap, tawdry and mediocre. As oratory, the speech's record speaks for itself. When presidents exhale the breath of history -- "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," or, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" -- they invariably do it someplace other than in the State of the Union. A rhetorical omnibus making all local stops, the speech conveys a year's worth of departmental hackwork. In "Lend Me Your Ears," William Safire's compilation of great speeches, not one State of the Union address makes the table of contents.

Lately, things have grown worse. President Bill Clinton's final State of the Union expired after 9,000 words and more kitchen sinks than you'll find at Home Depot. The Gettysburg Address, by comparison, was 266 words. It's perhaps not too early to predict which of the two speeches the world will little note nor long remember.

President Bush has been less fortunate. Not one but two of his addresses have produced entries for the books. The first was the over-greased "axis of evil" in 2002 -- alluring alliteration made memorable by inadvertent inanity. The second, in 2003, consisted of those 16 words about Saddam Hussein's uranium safari -- and yes, even the "has" and "of" turned out to be false.

The speech's cheap theatricality is finally beginning to grate, with some people calling it meaningless and ready for extinction. But the real problem with the State of the Union is not vapidity. The problem is fraud. Because the address has increasingly little to do with the union -- that is, the 300 million of us who represent the temporal sum of these United States. The speech instead has to do with the state of just one of us.

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The State of the Union is all about His Majesty, the president. Is he master of Congress or supplicant? How far will his poll numbers rise? How did he perform? Mr. Bush may not like French, but the address is the embodiment of "L'état, c'est moi," transforming citizens into subjects, much as Jefferson feared. To hammer this point home, each year the White House peppers the gallery with "Lenny Skutniks," the trade name for the human props deployed to underscore the president's applause lines. The real Lenny Skutnik rescued passengers from an airline crash before serving as a visual aid to President Ronald Reagan's 1982 State of the Union. Skutniks have orbited the Capitol dome ever since.

Those of us watching at home also have a role. First, we're meant to respond to the president's new proposals as enthusiastically as a representative sample of us did when the ideas were poll-tested weeks before. Second, we must keep in mind that the address works best if we conclude, after hearing the full inventory of marvels the president has done, is doing and will do, that we like him more than we thought we did last week. Hang onto those good vibrations when the phone rings. It could be a pollster!

Manipulation is the essence of the game, after all, and because no one ever stops playing it, the president is expected to exploit his free shot at the goal for all it's worth. The speech's solipsism is even endorsed by the innovation of an opposition response, institutionalizing the old Broadway joke: "Enough about me, what did you think of my performance?" Only in Washington, the irony is always lost.

Jimmy Carter, wearing his cardigan on his sleeve, dispensed with the royal treatment for his last annual message, in 1981, sending Congress a report in writing instead. In this, President Bush would do well to emulate the least emulated of our recent executives. As the presidency grows more imperial by the hour, the State of the Union address is an hour more than we the people can bear.

Op-Ed Contributor Francis Wilkinson is a communications consultant and speechwriter.